Show, not go, is nothing new

November 27, 2005|By Paul Duchene, Special to the Tribune

The illusion of speed in the auto industry is nothing new.

- Errett Lobban Cord understood it. The 1929 crash left the founder of Auburn-Cord-Duesenberg with a bunch of drab Auburns. He had the modest cars repainted in two-tone colors, giving them the appearance of movement even when standing still. All sold.

- Chrysler, in 1934, brought out its streamlined Airflow, which underwent wind-tunnel testing. Its weak styling doomed it to be dropped after 1937.

- Other streamlined shapes had varying degrees of success. Gordon Buehrig's 1936 Cord 810 was fast and looked it, but the 1941 Hollywood Graham borne of the demise of Auburn-Cord-Duesenburg in 1938, carried a warning not to exceed 60 m.p.h.

- In England in the 1930s Bentley, Alvis, Jaguar and Lagonda perfected raggedly exciting roadsters, with fold-down windshields, capable of 120 m.p.h. For one-tenth the price, you could buy an MG TA or a Singer LeMans, with all the excitement at half the speed--especially in tight turns.

- Chevrolet's 1955 models offered crisp styling and bright colors. Though they could be ordered with the new 265-cubic-inch small-block V-8 and performance options, many were mechanically pedestrian, with 6-cylinder motors and 2-speed automatics.

- The '60s were marked by the muscle of the big-block 409 Chevy Super Sports, then 427 Ford Thunderbolts. Chrysler bumped the Hemi to 426 ci in 1964. John DeLorean and the boys at Pontiac opened the muscle gates to all. They crammed a 389-ci V-8 into the LeMans to make the GTO in '64. Ford countered with Mustang, which sold 100,000 units in less than six months. But the strength of the market was in the 289-ci, double-barrel V-8 cars and the timid 200-ci 6-cylinder Mustangs, which sold for around $2,000. What was under the hood was secondary to the pony-car image.

- Insurance companies and environmental regulators then got into the act in the late '60s.

Teens then were making enough to buy the 375-h.p. muscle cars, which sold in the neighborhood of $3,300. "The insurance companies wised up to this menace and cars were reduced to `sticker rods'--they had the stripes, the flares and the air dams to keep the car on the ground at 100 m.p.h., when they'd be lucky to even do that," said Dan Stafford, who has run a GM muscle car wrecking yard in Kennewick, Wash., for 30 years.

Prime examples? The 1978 Road Runner, which was simply a $289 stripe package on a Plymouth Volare. The next year the AMX was a stripe kit on a Spirit (read Gremlin) chassis with about a 100-h.p. V-8. By this point, Pontiac's "big" 400 cubic-inch engine was putting out 180 horsepower.

"In the 1970s and '80s, emissions put the manufacturers in a situation where they had no choice," added Brian Moody, road test editor for Edmunds.com, the online auto service. "They were forced to put on stripes and red gauges to make the cars look fast."

- Enter the Japanese imports in the 1970s. "The Japanese were coming on with sporty cars--they weren't really sports cars--like the Datsun 200SX, which had a black interior, bucket seats and a 4-speed. It had a youthful look like the Camaro but was much smaller," Moody said.